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UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY
Utah Valley University Library
George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections
Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories
Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Anita Bradford
by
Kimberly Williamson
April 4, 2012
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Anita Bradford
Interviewer: Kimberly Williamson
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 4 April 2012
Recordist: Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Kimberly Williamson
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: AB = Anita Bradford (Interviewee)
KW = KimberlyWilliamson (Interviewer)
MW = Michele (Director, Utah Women’s Walk)
Brief Description of Contents:
Anita Bradford talks about growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, California, her experiences as a child dealing with the after math of the Depression, attending East Los Angeles Junior College at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and being sent to Brigham Young University after her freshman year of college. She also discusses her activism surrounding women’s issues, being hired at Utah Valley University to start a new program called “Better Jobs for Women,” and her greatest fight in changing medical procedures during child bearing. She explains various discriminations of women during Second Wave Feminism, her involvement in the ERA, and her bereavement process from the loss of her son. She also describes her battle with a terminal lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and her role as the leader of a state support group which assists people with this disease.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 2
Audio Transcription
[00:26]
Beginning of interview
KW: My name is Kimberly Williamson today is Wednesday April 4, 2012 and I am at the George Sutherland Archives in the Utah Valley University library. Today I am interviewing Anita Bradford to write my senior thesis and as a nominee for the Utah Women’s Walk. Today we are going to talk about her life and the many contributions she has made to Utah Valley University during her years of service.
First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to this interview and coming. I really appreciate it. Let’s start out with you telling me where you were born and your family structure.
AB: Okay, I was born in a town call Bell, California. It’s southeast Los Angeles in a poor working class area that is fairly infamous for a whole lot of reasons. (laughs) It was a great place to grow up as a kid when I was there. We had a lot of freedom. I came from what is known as a traditional family. My dad went to work every day; my mom stayed home. Even though I was born at the height of the Depression, even then married women did not go outside the home to work very much if they had any means of support at all. My dad was a journeyman machinist. Even though they had a terrible time in the Depression, it was before my memories. By the time I was born, my dad was working again, and things were getting better for them. I never felt personally the depths of despair of the Depression, but I was certainly scarred by their experiences. I think that most of us who are in that age group have real issues around security and being secure and those kinds of things. My father was the breadwinner, but I say that my mother was the bread manager. She ran the household. She was the money manager, and she took care of virtually everything else. They were very thrifty, very frugal, and they worked their way into a good solid secure life even though both of them had come from very difficult backgrounds. They were a real team. I learned to be tough and resilient and strong. They just did not allow anything else. (laughs) I think those are the basic core skills that I have.
They both were very much community activists. My father was very much a part of the labor movement. He was always fighting for workers’ rights. My mother was a powerhouse in the PTA. Back in that time in the Depression and World War II and post-World War II, the PTA was probably the most powerful interest group in California. What the PTA wanted, they got. My mother was committed to education for every child regardless of circumstances. She lived with that commitment; it never died for her. That was a crucial thing. She was always very active. In terms of improving educational opportunities. Because of her and the school principal—even though we were in a very poor working class area—we went to a model elementary school. There was not anything better in the United States at the time. It was because of the commitment of that principal, and the commitment of my mother, and the women that were part of that PTA that created that incredible educational environment. I look at kids today and I know that even Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 3
though all of this technology exists, I had the kind of education that very few kids get today. That’s sort of the background.
KW: Okay, let’s go back. When where you born?
AB: I was born in 1933.
KW: The month and day you were born.
AB: Oh, November 1.
KW: Okay, and then siblings.
AB: I have one brother; he was ten years than I. I had a sister, but she died before I was born. But I have to say that she had a tremendous impact on my life because of her loss because of what my mother went through, that affected my life greatly. Even though she wasn’t a real presence, she was very much a presence in my life.
KW: How old was she when she passed?
AB: She was about sixteen months old. Again, it was the depths of the Depression. She got a strep throat, and she became septic very quickly. As hard as they tried, they did not have any penicillin during that time, and they could not save her.
KW: You said that in elementary school, you went to a cutting-edge type school. Do you want to tell us about your junior high and high school experiences?
AB: (laughs) Junior high was a wasteland. I mean it’s just a wasteland for everybody; you just get through it. I don’t have a whole lot of memories of junior high except that it was a drudge. By the time I got to high school—nowadays you have middle schools and junior highs and high schools. We went through the seventh grade until the twelfth grade in the same school. You came in as a little tiny seventh grader, and you were there with seniors and juniors. You just got run over. It was terrifying. (laughs) The junior high [experience] was not the best time [for me]. By the time I got to high school, things were fine. I had a good group of friends. I was active in student government—worked on the school newspaper. I was very active in the Girls Athletic Association. We were the girl athletes of the school such as we were. High school was a much different experience—much better. I was glad to graduate. I was ready to move on. I was a good student. I enjoyed it, and several teachers were influential in my life, but I was ready to go when we graduated.
KW: Were your parents educated then?
AB: Both of my parents graduated from high school, which was, considering where they came from, was very rare. My mother’s high school graduating class only consisted of nine people. They probably represented maybe 10 percent of the population of that age. They Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 4
were in the wild mountains of Arizona in the copper mining area. People just didn’t go onto to school so high school graduation was a very big deal at that time in that place. All the rest of us went on. Their kids and my mother’s siblings’ kids all went on to be college graduates and professionals because education was just pounded into us. (laughs) By—
KW: By your father—
AB: —my grandfather, [he] was really a driving force. He was a Swedish immigrant. He just knew education was the way out of that terrible poverty, so each generation went on to the next level of education.
KW: When you graduated from high school, there was no doubt in your mind that you were going to go—
AB: I was going on to college.
KW: Okay, so where did you go to college?
AB: My first experience in college was East Los Angeles Junior College. It’s now called East Los Angeles Community College, and it’s a four-year school. It was a seminal experience in my life because it brought together everybody from the southeast side of LA. We had the Barrio; we had Watts, which is now known as South Central LA, and Southeast LA. It was a mixture of Latino, White, and Asian. East LA was virtually all Hispanic, and Watts was Blacks. I was a minority in that school. That was my first experience with being a minority in those kinds of settings. It was a great experience, and I loved it. We had good teachers. It was a rattletrap school in that it was made out of old World War II Quonset huts. It was rows and rows of old army barracks and Quonset huts. (laughs) That’s what we went to college in. We had excellent teachers; they were great. That’s when I first got involved in activism.
People do not know it, but the Civil Rights Movement really began in the fifties in those schools. With returning veterans from the Korean War, their previous compatriots out of World War II, they were doing all the groundwork, all the historical research that underwrote the Civil Rights Movement. I knew quite a few of those who went on to make terrific contributions to that. So it was a great experience. My parents wanted me out of there because they saw me becoming too involved, and so even though they were not Mormons, they sent me to BYU [Brigham Young University]—the safest place they could possibly (laughs) could get me.1 Then I went to BYU.
KW: How long did you attend—
AB: I was a freshman there. I did my freshman year there.
1. The Mormon Church is the unofficial, but common name for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so its members are often called Mormons.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 5
KW: And then you transferred—
AB: Then I came up to BYU.
KW What did you get your degree in?
AB: I got my degree in American history and political science with emphasis on American history and American political theory.
KW: Wow, then did you go on to get—
AB: I was the only female in the history department by the way. I was the only female history student.
KW: Wow, I bet you could tell some stories about that.
AB: Oh, yes. (laughs) Yes indeed, but most of them good, most of them good. [I wasn’t expecting to be the only woman in the department. I became quite shy until I got comfortable with the male students. I was taking a historiography class, and I hadn’t said one word. We took our midterm, which was an essay exam, and the professor, Dr. Richard Paul, wrote on my exam, “Anyone who can write like that can speak. You will not remain silent.” So I began talking in class and I was accepted in study groups. I became good friends with the other students.]2
KW: Then did you go and to get a master’s degree.
AB: I went and did all of my master’s work; I didn’t complete the thesis. By that time I was long married. By the time I went back for my master’s degree, I had a family. That was hard combining graduate work and four kids, home, and whatever. I managed to complete all of the studies, but I got so frustrated trying to write my thesis because what I wanted to do was study the issue of rape in Utah particularly in Utah County because we knew it was a significant problem, but nobody talked about it.
KW: What year was this?
AB: This was back in the early seventies, ’73. When the police chief told me that they didn’t even keep rape statistics—they just saw it as an addendum, an opportunity that men took when they were robbing a house. There were not records; they absolutely had no records. I couldn’t gather any data because it was buried in robbery or in these other kinds of places. They had no data. I just said, “I’ve better things to do with my time.” I left that and I went on to do some graduate studies at the University of Utah and also San Francisco University. I never quite completed the master’s degree.
2. With Anita Bradford’s approval, the portion in brackets was added by Sheree Bench in June 2013.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 6
KW: That is interesting about the rape. You said that you were married. Did you meet your husband in college?
[13:07]
AB: I met him when I was teaching school. I graduated from college and was teaching at Spanish Fork Junior High School. Went right back into the wasteland and met my husband there.
KW: Was he also a teacher?
AB: No, he was just out of the army. It was at the end of the Korean War. He was just back from the army a few months when I met him.
KW: What year were you married?
AB: In 1956.
KW: Then did you start having a family right away?
AB: Yes, well close to right away.
KW: Were you working when you had your family or did you stay at home?
AB: No, it was a time when women were not going into the work place unless they absolutely had too. We suffered along in dire poverty while our kids were little. Then I went back to school in the early seventies and worked on my master’s degree. Then [I] ended up having another baby ten years later. (laughs) My youngest child was ten years old when my youngest child came along, which was another thing that stopped the master’s degree, was that pregnancy. I really needed to get back into the workforce. Our oldest sons were headed to college, missions, and things like that. There just wasn’t enough money to cover all those expanded needs. I needed to get back into the workplace, and started looking for work. That is when this job came available at the college, and then I saw the ad in the paper. I had been out looking for jobs. It was really discouraging because they wanted you to work, but they didn’t want to pay anything. When this job came open, the job description just fit everything I’d been doing.
I had been a political activist always. I had been very active politically. I had been active in helping women. We had a storefront walk-in place where women could come drop in and talk. We had all kinds of things going on. It was at a very small level, but we were dealing with the women’s issues that we could see coming—women who were divorced and did not know where to turn and all kinds of issues—
KW: Now did you do this through an organization or was it something—
AB: It was something we put together; a whole group of us put together—Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 7
KW: Who’s we?
AB: Well, it was a group of friends. If you are talking about a fixed organization, it didn’t have one. It was not funded. People would call us on the phone and ask, Who is funding you? They thought we were part of the communist conspiracy. (laughs) Nobody was funding us; whatever expenses we had, we met. One of the good friends was a nurse and so she along with a doctor opened up a little clinic for women.
KW: Where was this at?
AB: Right downtown Provo, [Utah] right on Center Street.
KW: Okay.
AB: They donated their time to helping women get medical help because they had no access. You have to realize that back in those days women did not have access to contraceptives unless they were married. They did not have access to reproductive health issues. This was a volunteer thing—
KW: This is the kind of women’s issues that you saw in the community, and so you got together with a group of friends—
AB: Yes, we had to do something—just the grass roots something.
KW: Wow, that is—
AB: I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of political experience and a lot of community organization experience when this job came open. It just had my name written on it. Even though there were a number of people who interviewed for it, I just felt that it was going to be—and I pestered them to death. (laughs) I kept calling and saying, “Have you made your decision yet.” It was a very touchy subject. This grant was a very touchy subject, and so the school took their time deciding who they wanted to have here—who they wanted to start the program and how I would fit in. They were careful to begin with and how they wanted it structured was very important. That they had someone who was already a credible member of the community was important. They took great care in establishing it as an integral part of the school.
KW: Did you want to discuss what type of a program? So this was Better Jobs—
AB: We named it Better—it did not have a name. It had a 21,000-dollar price tag. We had 21,000 dollars to work with. That would not cover much at all so I always taught here. Half of my contract came from the teaching; the other half came from the grant. We were trying to conserve as much of the grant for services as possible. From the beginning, I taught half time here [Orem campus] and then the other [time] went into building the program. Some of the best advice I ever got came from a vice-president of administrative Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 8
services named LaVar Rockwood. After I was hired, I went and talked to every single person on that hiring committee about what they had in mind: what they would support and what they wouldn’t support. The best advice he gave me was, “You go to every department in this school and introduce yourself. Do not worry about all of a sudden trying to serve women. First of all get grounded here. Get grounded on this campus; let people know who you are.”
My job—this grant was written to try to get women into nontraditional jobs. We’re not talking about getting them into secretarial. We are talking about getting them out there in automotive, in truck driving, and heavy equipment—things that those men were not used to at all. It was tough. Anyway, I followed his advice, took the first month, and made myself acquainted to every single department in the school especially in the trades, which is where I needed to have some support. They were very skeptical, but not negative. The men in heavy equipment, in fact were very good because they said that women made very good heavy equipment operators. They weren’t negative at all. We got some really good women through that program. Others programs had a tougher time with it. Eventually they saw me not as a threat. They saw the program not as a threat, but as something that they could work with. I got to know people in admissions. I had to know how we got people into school. From the ground up, I had to figure out how the system worked so I could access it.
Then I had to network with all of the outside institutions. The Church was going to be a very important part of this support system; it would continue to be, and still is.3 Welfare—all women had in those days was welfare. That is the only source for support they had. It became very important that we work with welfare and the services that they offered. The grant came from Mountainland Association of Governments, which came down through the federal government. I needed to get to know the people at the Department of Education. There was this whole other outside networking. That had to be done in order to start seeing women being referred into us from these sources, once they had established that we could do what we had set out to do.
And then the other thing was employers; they were just a critical part of this whole thing. They had to be willing to hire these women into these positions. I put together an advisory board made up of several businessmen in the community. All of them were very supportive and we on to be—we couldn’t have survived without them because they ended up making financial contributions; they ended up hiring. They really helped make the program work in the early stages. So give them full credit for having that kind of vision too.
KW: You talk about outreach into the community through agencies. Did you do any other outreach to let women know that this program was available?
AB: Those were their sources of information. You can’t go door to door. (laughs)
3. Anita refers to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 9
KW: Right, right.
AB: Where you made your contact was at the welfare office. We put together flyers and programs. We went out to the schools, and there were a lot of kids there with single parents. We went out to the schools and went to the PTA. We just made contacts wherever we could—any personal relationships within our own networks. And slowly but surely this pattern began to build—women being referred into us. For the first two years, it was fairly slow, but after that, it just took off.
KW: Was this back on the campus when they were in Provo?
AB: We started out on the old campus in Provo. Then they moved us up to this campus. Then they moved us back to the old campus because they had a lot more space down there. We had a really nice suite of offices down there. We had several classes going all the time. By that time, we had expanded the staff. I had an assistant director. We had other women who were either part-time or full-time working on job creation, teaching, training, and those kinds of things. We had a nice layout there. My problem was, I was director over there and teaching on this campus so I was running (laughs) back and forth that was my only problem. I really liked being over there because we had our own classroom space.
KW: What did you teach?
AB: Here?
KW: Uh-huh.
AB: I taught everything in the beginning. I taught English, I taught sociology, I taught—this school was growing by leaps and bounds. (laughs) If you had any kind of background whatever in any subject you were likely to get tossed into that subject. I taught interpersonal communications along with American history—wherever they had a gap to fill. I couldn’t teach math or anything like that, but any of the humanities, I taught at one time or the other.
KW: Let’s go back to the early sixties when Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique came out. Did you read that book or did it have any influence on—
AB: I was a feminist long before Betty Friedan’s book came out. The women’s movement was well underway. It’s like our little storefront project; even though it wasn’t visible and wasn’t seen, the writers were already writing. The history was being done. Betty Friedan’s book—I’m not going to critique the book. It touched a chord that was already there. An idea has to drop on fertile ground; it was just ready to explode anyway. She became a focal point for all those ideas—of all of the pent up anger and all of the frustrations that women had been feeling everywhere. There were other authors that were much greater influences on me—
KW: Do you want to elaborate on those works?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 10
AB: Well, Simone de Beauvoir. There were many feminists in an earlier generation. The whole suffragist movement—the whole turn of the century movement—those women had a tremendous impact on me.
KW: Did you study those women when you were in history?
AB: Uh-huh.
KW: So you were really—
AB: Well on my own; there were no classes that were directed at that at all. There was a whole body of literature by great women—American writers that even though they were novels they still related the realities in women’s lives. I was influenced by all of those [writers]. Betty Friedan struck the spark that began the full origination, the whole sweep of the feminist move. Gloria Steinman was much more direct in [her] involvement, in her writings, and in her speaking than Betty Friedan. It all just came together in the sixties, but we were all there. The army was ready to go. She [Betty Friedan] was not a seminal influence on me specifically.
KW: You mentioned missions.4 I’m assuming that you married somebody who was LDS.
AB: Um-hm, yes.
KW During Second Wave Feminism, did you have young children at home when you came to work here in ‘78?
AB: Oh, yes. When I started to work here, this baby that came along after we thought our family was done, he was two years old when I started to work here. The rest of my children were twelve and into their late teens. They were seniors in high school and juniors in high school.
KW: They refer a lot to second shift of women working and then going home to cooking and cleaning and that.
AB: Uh-huh.
KW: Did you experience that in your relationship?
AB: First of all, my kids were older except for the baby. My kids were very good about coming in after school and picking him up from the babysitter. My husband was very
4. A mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical area to which Latter-day Saint missionaries are assigned. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 11
supportive. One thing I had that a lot of women didn’t have was a husband who really cared about the work that I was doing. He was really proud of the work I was doing. I had a great deal of support from him. The kids were old enough. If they came home and they were hungry, they could fix themselves something. It wasn’t a matter of coming home and having to do [things for them because] they knew how to turn on the washer. They had assignments; they didn’t always keep them. It wasn’t as hard on me in many ways as it was on a lot of the women I worked with who were single parents who had no support system. They didn’t have a supportive husband. They came home and they had to do it all. I had it much better in that way. The second thing was, I was never tied into or worrying about the things that women were judged on. I was never a good housekeeper; I’d rather read a book any day than dust. I let a lot of details go. I concentrated on our family, their well-being, and the big picture. I let the details go.
[31:30]
KW: During that time here in Utah, I know just from doing other interviews that the women would get heat from their neighbors about working outside their home. Did you experience that?
AB: Um, (laughs) a neighbor gentleman who lived next door to us met my husband out at the mailbox one day and said to him, “Mr. Bradford, you are a very patient man.” (laughs) Yeah, they saw me as something—some of them saw me, not all of them. I had a lot of people come to me privately or through the back door to talk or whatever to get advice, but there were those who were very skeptical of me. I had to deal with both those things. One of the questions you ask is and maybe you are coming to that. I have to say: I loved the community that I lived in. These women were remarkable women. The older generation—older than me—they were feminists; they didn’t know it. They were very strong; they were well read. They were dynamic. Somewhere in the fifties that got lost. The post-World War II thing that was, “go home and take care of your families” really came into play. And so those women who had come up in my mother’s generation, they were terrific, and they were very strong mentors for me. I had all kinds of support from those women in my community.
KW: That is good that’s—
AB: When I was fighting to find some kind of contraception just trying to get information—I had five pregnancies in nine years—I was desperate and people did not want to give it to me. Doctors didn’t want to give you that information. I had to really fight. It became a public fight; it was unseemly. I was willing to do anything. Those kinds of things were battlegrounds that most young women today do not even know existed. [They] don’t even know anything about it. They do not know how we delivered children. I put a big long story in here (referring to response to questions sent before interview) this is for you.
KW: Oh.
AB: This is for you. I became the fighting feminist just by the way we had to deliver Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 12
children. Those were stories that are not very well known, and they were not told.
KW: I think that they need to be told because I think women today don’t realize what a fight, and there still needs to be a progressive movement.
AB: We are moving backwards in time. My granddaughters will look at me and say, Why are you talking about contraceptives. I said, “I thought I fought that battle and won it forty years ago. I’m sorry, but you are going to have to fight it all over again.”
KW: Uh-hm.
AB: It is one of those perpetual things. We think we’re safe and we are not.
KW: In one of my classes, we were discussing the election and they said that contraceptives for women and women issues are always the main topic when it is time for an election—
AB: (laughs)
KW: That’s seems to be the fighting battle, which is just alarming to think that.
AB: There is that certain group of people who are just fixed on those ideas. Without access to contraception, all other feminist issues are moot. All the rest just go away. You don’t talk about work for equal pay you if you can’t plan your family.
KW: Right.
AB: That is the fundamental bullwhip of women’s rights. And there are no other rights if that one is taken away. Nothing else is going to take its place. We do fight that battle over and over again from the very conservative element.
KW: Were there women in your life that you admired growing up?
AB: Yes, my mother who was always out there fighting for children. The principal of our school, I adored her.5
KW: [The principal] was a woman?
AB: Yes, she was a woman. She was from Scotland and she had a lovely Scott’s brogue. I still love to hear it because I associate that with love, joy, and all those things that she brought to that school. She was so committed to children and just giving us the best possible education. We had the arts; I mean we had it all. Even during the atomic bomb testing, as children we were taught to get under our desks, she made it exciting. We could hardly wait for the bomb to drop because we were going to stay at school. We had candy and pillows. She was just superb. I had several teachers that were male and female that were
5. Mrs. Ritchie.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 13
important in my life. My older cousins I really admired. Several of the great jazz singers of the time—the jazz singers particularly in their music influenced me. Eartha Kitt and Lena Horne, and Dinah Shore, these are not names that you would have any connection with—
KW: No, I know whom you are talking about. (laughter)
AB: —Billie Holiday. The actresses were not particularly [influential]; I loved movies, but it was the singers that really—
KW: —strong—
AB: — held my attention, I really admired. I loved music and I loved to dance. Those were also very strong women who really had to battle just to survive and many of them didn’t.
KW: Right.
AB: They were great influences on me. Oh, I forgot Eleanor Roosevelt was my heroine. She was the great female political figure that I admired.
KW: During the early seventies, the Equal Rights Amendment was hotly debated across the U.S. And in many states, it passed, but it didn’t in Utah. Did you have any involvement in this process?
AB: (laughs) Up to my eyeballs. Yes, I was very active in the Equal Rights Movement from start to finish. Organizationally, the big culminating experience of that here in Utah was the International Year of the Woman. The Equal Rights Amendment was at its fever pitch. I was on the organization committee for that. I served on the education committee. (laughs) We just got blown out of the water. That was sort of the death knell at that point. From start to finish, I was very much an outspoken.
KW: It made a real division here in Utah.
AB: Yes, it did. It’s still a divide.
KW: Are women as vocal as they were back during the ERA debates?
AB: The Equal Rights Amendment even though it failed, it brought on a whole range of legislation—
KW: Right.
AB: —that eased the burden.
KW: Right. Were you involved with that? Did you work with that group of women that went into the legislation?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 14
AB: Yes.
KW: Oh, okay.
AB: Yes, very much so, especially again on Better Jobs for Women. It all came from legislative funding. We had to be up there every year to fight for the funding with both the federal government and the state government. The money flowed down through the Department of Education and through Mountainland Association of Governments, both of which were what we call soft money. They were federally funded they had to be written by grants every year, and they had to be renewed every year. We were always at risk every year—
KW: Of losing your funding.
AB: Yes, to losing the funding.
KW: When you came in you started saying that the program you started is now called, Turning Point, and it’s the only one in the state that has survived.
AB: It is the only one left in the community in the college system, in the state college system—
KW: Oh, okay.
AB: —to survive. If they have others out there that are outside the college system they may be there, but I’m not aware of any.
KW: Okay, but they are not funded the same way. Do you want to elaborate on why you believe that Turning Point is still at UVU [Utah Valley University]?
AB: Well, I go back to its foundation. It had tremendous support at the highest levels at this school. She wasn’t the academic vice-president then, but Lucille Stoddard was the dean of the School of Business. Carrol Reid was the associate dean of women in student services. We had a strong foundation of people on this campus who were ready to do battle for it and they did. We got into trouble fairly often.
I had good friends in political office who were part of my life. That is part of what I brought into this program with me was a very strong political base. I had outside support, and there were a lot of very strong women. I do not know if these names are familiar to you or not: Algie Ballif, Phyllis Van Wagenen, and this county had some very powerful women who were mentors and supporters. We had a good solid base here of people with significant clout that could keep us going when we ran into problems, and we did. I could call all those chips in when we needed it. I think the reason we have survived is because we started out with such a broad base of support from people that really mattered. The other schools did not; they took the funding because it was there but they really did not Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 15
care. There were good women who ran those programs, but they just didn’t get the support from the wider community and from their own schools that they needed.
Then the second reason why it maintained is you always have to train those who come after you. You have to bring in good people. I had a wonderful woman who was my assistant director who became the director. Her name was Linda Barlow. She married during the time that she was there. She is Linda Johnson now, but she was the assistant director and became the director.
You burn out in these jobs; sorry, but it takes a toll. I was there for ten years; Linda was there for ten years, and followed on by another great woman. Over each decade, the program got bigger and stronger [and] served more people. A daycare program was established. They have a wonderful daycare program over there. They expanded the programs that were offered and the money was available. It just has become an integral of the school.
[45:43]
KW: Now what happened to your storefront, of offering services and that when you came to work here?
AB: It had already disappeared by then. Two of the women that were here left. One took a teaching position up at Westminster. Another woman was the wife of a math professor at BYU, and he took another position. These little grassroots organizations aren’t strong.
KW: Right.
AB: You need a broader institutional base and a more permanent base. That had all ready dissipated, and we had on gone to other—
KW: Was Better Jobs for Women were you able to help women with contraceptives or anything like that.
AB: That was not our field; we referred them on.
KW: Okay, I’m not from here so did they eventually have Planned Parenthood come into—
AB: Planned Parenthood was an important part of our support system. The other part was the women’s shelters for battered women. They got a lot of medical resources through that. The YWCA was a very important part of the shelter system. We had women shelters here that we could get women into very quickly. The shelter would refer them to us for assessment in terms of what they needed for jobs skills. We had a good working relationship there. The women’s shelters were a very important part for medical support as well as safety.
MW: Kimberly, let me interject a question if you don’t mind? Can you give me an exact Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 16
location of where this storefront or pre-Planned Parenthood was?
AB: It was down on Center Street, [Provo] and I am going way back in time. It was down on Center Street right in the middle of the block. And we were upstairs; you had to go up stairs to access it.
MW: Do you know what west or east it was?
AB: It was sort of between University and First. It seems to me that it was right in between University and First West, but it might have been between First and Second.
MW: Okay.
AB: I cannot remember exactly.
MW: How many years did it operate?
AB: Oh, not very long. We weren’t at it very long. There was real suspicion, you know—who are you people? (laughs) The little clinic that we had, created suspicions [even though] the doctor and my friend that was the nurse were just doing basic medical care for women who had no access to medical care anywhere and also contraceptive help and things like. Because we were working outside the norm, it was—
MW: Do you have an approximate date that it would have been? I think this is fascinating that you would do this on your own. Who was the doctor? Do you have the doctor’s name?
AB: I would not give you the name if I remembered. (laughs)
MW: Okay. Because you feel that stigma of—
AB: Yeah—
MW: It was kind of that kind of thing. What years—
AB: He was very young. Um, I am trying to go back to the years; it would have been the late sixties. For me to pinpoint an exact year—I’m not certain but it was at the height of the women’s movement. We had a network from Salt Lake down through here of women who were doing these kinds of things. Trying to get—
MW: Help for—
AB: If you read my story on what it was like to deliver a baby in the 1950s. The one fight we did win was the battle over what happened to us in delivery of children. We were manacled down; our arms were strapped down; our feet were put in stirrups and manacled. We were flat on our backs; we were utterly powerless—just totally powerless. That was my rage and I tell you my story here. [I had a horrendous experience at the birth Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 17
of my daughter in 1966. There were several of us in labor that day. The nurses thought I
would deliver first because I’d already had children. But my labors were usually slow.
The doctor told them, “You could take a trip around the world before Mrs. Bradford
delivers! Call me when she’s ready.” So they let me lay there strapped to the bed. But I
could tell the baby was coming and I told the nurses, but they didn’t pay attention. Finally
a nurse checked me but by then the delivery room was occupied. They didn’t let me
deliver in the bed I was in. The nurse took me to a surgery room and put me on a surgical
table with a straight drop off the end—legs strapped in the air and arms strapped to the
table—and left me there to go find the doctor. Well, I could tell the baby was coming and
I looked up and in the reflection of the equipment I saw the head crowning, and I knew if
that baby was born with no one there, it would fall straight to the floor. So I screamed for
the nurse, and my husband and the nurse crashed through the door at the same time,
followed by the doctor who got there just in time to catch the baby. That was my “aha”
moment!]6
That is what turned me into a street fighting feminist was the humiliation of being told
that I was crazy because I was in labor. When I asked why they were strapping my hands
down they said, “You might hurt yourself.” The first battle that we won, and we really
won it, I think, for good was the battle over how pregnant women were treated. It was
like you didn’t belong to yourself at all; you had no say in what was going to happen to
you and no choices. What happened during this movement—when we did this storefront
thing—what was happening along with that, is a grassroots movement of home births
began. Women decided that they were going to take control of their childbearing
themselves. This whole grassroots movement of lay midwives and home births started. I
was interviewed by the women who wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves.7 The medical system
has always been very quick to respond to the bottom-line. They shifted very quickly into
more humane delivery practices. You began to get birthing rooms, families being able to
be there, and birthing chairs, and more humane practices in delivering babies.
KW: That’s interesting because I would have never thought of that because in First Wave
Feminism those women all had their babies at home.
AB: Exactly.
KW: They had more control.
AB: Sure, my mother-in-law had all her children at home with a midwife.
6. With Anita Bradford’s approval, the portion in brackets was added by Sheree
Bench in June 2013.
7. Our Bodies, Ourselves is a book about women's health and sexuality produced
by the nonprofit organization Our Bodies Ourselves (originally called the Boston
Women's Health Book Collective). The current edition, published in 2011, contains 825
pages.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 18
KW: Then like you said that turn of the centuries and the fifties medical procedures took over—
AB: Became a whole systematic at the convenience of the system and not the woman. That was probably the most successful thing that happened. When my daughter looks back at what I went through—I mean young women cannot believe that happened—that it was possible. I said it was not that long ago (laugh) that was the way you were born.
KW: Didn’t they knock women out?
AB: In earlier days, they did, like my mother.
KW: Right.
AB: She was just out, but that was very damaging to the babies. They quit doing that, but then they still wanted to make it convenient for the doctor. They didn’t trust the mother who was giving birth to take care of her own interests. I don’t know what they thought she was going to do. They just wanted everything to be at their convenience. We just didn’t participate. At that point of time without have the anesthetic to put you out there wasn’t anything in-between. They could give you some pain relief in the early stages, but for me what they could give just stopped my labor entirely. All my babies were full bore natural. Natural birth, which was okay, I still have nightmares about it. (laughs)
KW: Oh.
AB: (laughs) That’s what we did. I mean you knew that it was going to hurt and you just sucked it up. You pushed and you just did it, but it was the treatment that was—
KW: Did you see this discrimination here on campus with women who were pregnant during the years you were here?
AB: Initially women who were teaching here were terrified of revealing if they were pregnant. They would hide it for as long as they could. I probably don’t want to go into those stories because they’re not my stories to tell.
KW: Right.
AB: But, yeah there was that here.
KW: Did you feel discriminations being a woman as far as wage and that type of thing when you were here?
AB: No, the school had you come in and here is the wage scale. This is where you fit into the wage scale. You did not feel discrimination because it was a very public—you went up this column and then you shifted to that column depending on your education and your years of experience. I am sure there was some there; I don’t doubt at all. I’m sure they Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 19
could find a man with more experience than a women coming in with the same. That was not my focus. We did run into other kinds of discrimination, promotional discrimination and those kinds of things. The first big EEOC battle that was waged in the state was on this campus and won, but it took three years.
[56:22]
KW: Is that when they had to go to the appellate court to finally get a decision.
AB: Well, it didn’t go to court because it went through the Equal Opportunity Commission. It went through that route. It had to go all the way to the top of that route to get it settled. It took three years for that to happen.
KW: After you left the program, did you leave UVU?
AB: No, I transferred in and became full-time faculty.
KW: In what department?
AB: In the history political science department. I taught history, and the first classes that were created here. I created anthropology and archeology. I taught philosophy and American history.
KW: How long did you stay here at UVU?
AB: I was here until—(laughs) I’ve been in and out so it is hard to say when did you end.
KW: Uh-huh.
AB: My official retirement I think came in ’99, but the school was growing by leaps and bounds, and they just had need of additional faculty. You have interviewed Elaine Englehardt, and she brought the Ethics and Values, and they needed teachers for that so they asked me to come back and teach in Ethics and Values, that philosophy class. I did that for two or three years. Finally, around 2003, 2004, I was finally just gone. (laughs)
KW: You said, “Forget it no more—
AB: Well, you know part of the problem was having enough faculty. As they moving towards university status they really had to make sure that everybody had those degrees and they were in place. I was ready to be done anyway; that was okay with me. They had to really get their ducks in a row to get accredited for the advanced degrees. I didn’t have those things. There was a real march towards [becoming a university] and they brought in a wonderful faculty. There was terrific faculty during that time.
KW: What would you say was your most difficult trial you faced?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 20
AB: I wasn’t clear on what you wanted in that question or if you meant—
KW: Throughout your life.
AB: Public difficulty, private difficulty, I wasn’t sure where you were going—
KW: Whatever you feel comfortable in. I would say private but if it—
AB: Okay—
KW: —is too private of course, we do not—
AB: I divided it in two because public and private lives are very different. The public loss was the loss of the ERA. I put my whole heart and soul in that. The private one was the death of my son.
KW: Oh, my how old was he?
AB: Sixteen.
KW: Where did he fit into the family?
AB: He was the baby.
KW: Oh, the one—
AB: Uh-hm.
KW: That’s a tough situation. Have you lived your life by any mottos or maxims?
AB: One is just keep moving; it is hard to hit a moving target. (laughs) You just keep moving forward, and you never give up. I think what my parents taught us about being resilient and tough have translated it into those kinds of things. Life is tough, and I come out of that period of time when people really had to scrabble just to survive. You never ask the question why me. If it happened to you, you just sucked it up. You put it in place and you fought your way through it. I don’t have a motto in terms of—
KW: Right.
AB: I don’t have a bumper sticker. (laughs) Those are sort of the core values. Is that you live life as it comes, and there is great joy and there is great sorrow. And you don’t get through this life—hopefully, you will get both. It would be nice, but I don’t know. Sorrow just goes with living. You get both; you get the high spots and you get the low spots. My mother died at ninety. She had a very hard life, but at the end, she was contented. She remembered all the good things, and she let go of a lot of the difficulties. I think we do this hopefully if we age well, we sort of put everything in perspective. Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 21
KW: What advice would you give to women in Utah today?
AB: You are going to fight these fights all over again. We thought we had them won and they are not. I just come back to that core issue for women. If they do not have control of their own bodies, if they can’t do their family planning, all the other issue are removed. You just do not have any other options; you have to be able to plan your families. You have to be able to do what’s best for you and your family. I cannot tell you how many women came through our program with seven, eight, and nine children. The fathers just got fed up; they participated in it, but they just walked away from it. That was one of the issues; those women had [was] big families and that’s devastating. You ask a question down here that I thought was really important. (looking through notes) You ask about the issues of wage discrimination and those kinds of things, and one of the things that you didn’t put there and it is very important. Arguably, the single biggest issue for women in the work place was sexual harassment.
KW: Um.
AB: We don’t often know and women who have not been in the workplace do not know how pervasive or how insidious it is and was. Virtually every single woman I dealt with. I dealt with it in my own life. I dealt with it with every single woman who came through [the program]. Every single woman who is a friend and we’ve talked. Have all faced it. Along with wage discrimination was the objectification of women. Particularly if they were single, they were extremely vulnerable to harassment. It was just as pervasive here as it was any place else. We finally have laws on the books that protect women, but it doesn’t protect them all the way.
KW: Right.
AB: Women are in that one pretty much alone. They have to be trained and taught. One of the things we did in Better Jobs for Women was we trained them how to cope with sexual harassment because we knew they were going to face it.
MW: Wow, how did you train them? What could they do in those days without the laws? What would you recommend that they do? How bad was the sexual harassment?
AB: Oh, it was pervasive; it was everywhere. It was pretty much taken for granted. The men didn’t see it at all; they didn’t recognize it for what it was. They protected one another in that whole thing. First of all, we taught them that when they recognized that somebody has their eye on them and was putting them in these situations, we taught them not to be alone. They did not go into this man’s office or they did not go into this particular space alone. They kept something between them and the other person. Secondly, they found mentors within the system who would protect them. And very often, that was another man who would do that, at some risk. At some risk, they would do that. We taught them how to recognize the signals. We also taught them how to recognize their own vulnerabilities because very often these women were single and lonely, and they were Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 22
vulnerable. We taught them that in a case in a workplace, it is going to be the woman who goes and not the man. If you are involved with a man at your workplace, you are going to be gone not him. If you need that job, you have to figure out how to avoid it. We did lots of funny things too. (laughs) What they would face often if they rejected the male outright then he would spread the rumor that they were a lesbian. I mean (laughs) that was just common ground. I had to deal with that with one of the young women that worked here.
KW: (laughs) Oh, gosh.
AB: Women are much better at coping with that now. They have a lot more options now in coping with it. Today women are in a lot more powerful position because of the laws. They can look at them and just say no. Back then, that wasn’t the case especially when they desperately needed the jobs. Everything depended on the attitude of the person who was at the top. If the person at the top was lenient towards sexual harassment, was lenient towards exploiting those women, then it went all the way down the line. If the person at the top kept it in check and didn’t tolerate it, then women were in a safe place.
KW: That is very, very true—
MW: Generally speaking, was UVU a safe atmosphere for women?
AB: Generally yes. There were a few exceptions but generally yes.
KW: What would you like to be remembered for?
AB: That you never give up. That you know that the battles you think you are won are not.
This has been going on since the beginning of time. I don’t care what issue it is; issues of freedom are never settled. You just have to keep trying, you have to keep working at it, and that’s at the personal level as well as at the political and social level. It’s across the board, and people get tired; you get worn out. There has to be the next generation that comes along who is (laughs) willing to take it up. I thought we had laid some things to rest, but they’re definitely not.
KW: Did you teach your children to be active in political rights?
AB: Right, two of my sons have run for public office—very politically active. I’ve got the whole spectrum. I have kids who really have come into the political arena and been community activists. I’ve got one who just did not. You talk about nightmares; he still has nightmares about being out in the street with me, when he (laughs) was six years old marching down the street handing out pamphlets. He does not want anything to do with it. My daughter who is very much a feminist, but she is not politically active. She does other things that express that. She’s a yoga instructor. She’s into the alternative kinds of things and so she’s taken it in a different direction. That is fine; that is good with me. They’re sort of all over the map, but all believers in human rights.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 23
KW: What about your grandchildren? Have you tried to educate them?
AB: Oh, yeah, we’re all politically orientated. The grandkids in many ways are more so than their own parents. Again they sometimes take it in different directions, but they’re all very active, very aware, and into their own particular phases of political activism.
KW: Are you still really politically active?
AB: Well, being a Democrat—(laughs)
KW: I was going to say, do you go to the caucuses. (laughs)
AB: No, I’m not; I have to be honest with you. Again, that is a battle that has to be taken up by this generation. I donate and I support and I write and I do all those things, but the physical aspect of being out there, I don’t do that anymore. The political climate is so different than it was then. It makes it harder for me.
KW: What kinds of things do you write? So you said that you still write?
AB: Oh, yeah, essays.
KW: Do you submit them to journals?
AB: Well, not journals, but letters to the editor—
KW: Okay.
AB: —those kind of things. I wrote for my sons when they were running for office. Lucille and I keep threatening to write a book, but (laughs) we will see if that ever happens.
KW: I think you should.
AB: Do you have any more questions for me?
KW: (turning to Michele Welch) Do you have any other questions, Michele?
[01:14:15]
MW: I’m interested in knowing what you would like to accomplish before the end of your life. Is there anything that you would like to have happen that you haven’t accomplished yet?
AB: I still have some traveling to do. I don’t know whether if I will be able to do it or not, but I still have the hopes that I can accomplish that. I am very, very interested in our medical system—what it can and cannot do. The interest groups that control access to even research, those are things that I am working on now. I have hobbies; I keep bees and I’m a beekeeper. There are things that provide escape and wonder and joy for me. I think that Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 24
you have to be involved in that way too. I think you cannot just be angry all the time. (laughs)
MW: How many hives do you have?
AB: We had five; we lost some this winter, so we’re rebuilding our hives. We have two that are still healthy. My son and I, between us, we have seven hives. We provide wonderful honey for the family; [they are] just fascinating creatures to watch.
MW: What other hobbies do you enjoy doing?
AB: I read incessantly. Again traveling when I can is important to me. Gardening is important. I’ve always been a swimmer, but my health situation right now sort of limits that. I’m going to work with the doctor to help get me back into the pool, but swimming with an oxygen tank becomes problematic. I didn’t realize that it was going to be because there’s all kinds of scuba diving equipment. I have always been a snorkeler so I thought there is no problem they will have oxygen tanks that they’ll have. They have nothing for people who have lung problems to get into the pool and swim, which seems ridiculous to me. There would be a lot of money in it for someone who came up with an inventive way. I’ve jerry-rigged a system and everyone that does swim who has a lung disease has jerry-rigged some kind of silly system that doesn’t work very well, but it does get you in the pool. I need to be more dedicated to that.
MW: Do you mind telling us about your physical condition? When that started or when that happened?
AB: I have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It’s a terminal disease; there is no cure. There is no known treatment, but I’m an activist. I went looking for what people know. I discovered up at the University of Utah drug trial programs going on. I got into a drug trial program. When you have nothing to lose, you might as well get involved. In that process, they asked me to be the leader of the support group for people with this disease in this state. I am the informal leader of the IPF support group. We meet every other month and have experts come in and talk to us about how we can manage our health and what we can do. I have been in this drug trial program now for four years, which is much longer than most drug trials programs go on. In the first phase, you have a double blind study in which part of the group gets a placebo and part gets the medication. Nobody knows, not even the doctors who are monitoring know what you got. Then they test you constantly for how well you are doing. When they got through the first phase then they put us all on the drug. We went into the second phase where they put everyone on the drug. Then they went to the FDA for approval. This particular drug has been approved in Europe; it’s been approved in Japan. The initial group between the placebo and the drug, there was not enough differentiation between how well they did. The placebo group did pretty much as well as the drug group. The FDA wanted evidence of greater separation so they continued—they keep on continuing the trial until they satisfy the FDA that there is some value in the drug.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 25
MW: When were you diagnosed with this disease?
AB: Five years ago.
MW: Has it changed your life significantly?
AB: Oh, yes, it does change your life significantly. Yeah, I can’t do the things that I used to do. Fortunately, I was very healthy except for being told you have a terminal lung disease. (laughs) The rest of me was in good shape. I have held up far longer than the average prognosis. But I’m beginning to see over those four years there has been a drop in lung capacity. I think the drug has helped because I think it has slowed down the progress of the disease. It’s not going to cure it, but it has slowed it down significantly.
MW: Did you have any other health problems throughout your life or were you always healthy?
AB: I was pretty much healthy, and there’s no history of it in my family at all. Probably an environmental genetic collision that [caused it], I think the environment is creating incredible range of diseases that we have not had to face before.
MW: Yes.
KW: We see that here in Utah, and it’s really scary.
MW: Do you mind if I ask you and you say you do not want to go there—because you mentioned Eleanor Roosevelt, and I am a lover of Eleanor myself. She said, “There is nothing particularly interesting about another person’s life’s story unless as we read it, we can say why that is how they worked it out perhaps there is a way that I can do it too.” If you don’t mind going back and telling us about your son’s passing away. Is that too difficult to talk about or is it something you can teach other women about what you’ve learned through that loss or any of the circumstances?
AB: Yeah, it is such a devastating thing. As you go down into such depths, it is so difficult. I find it very difficult when someone has gone through this to go and comfort them because I know there isn’t any. What I do is go and say, “I’m here and I understand.” For everybody it is different; everybody brings a different set of coping skills or survival skills. I don’t know what you call them, but everybody brings something different.
KW: Was your mother still alive when your son passed?
AB: No, as a matter of fact she died three years before he did. One of the things that I knew from her that affected my life is she was never able to resolve her grief [of my sister’s passing]. So she could never give to me what she could have because she was afraid of that hurt again. One of the things I knew is that I couldn’t back away from my own children. I couldn’t be afraid and had to get past the worst of that for them. The other thing, I think you have to let yourself go into the grief. Just go into it. Experience it all Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 26
and I don’t think you ever get it resolved. I don’t think you ever get over it if you don’t. One of the interesting gender things is the doctor handed me the candy store in terms of pills to ease my grief. They never offered my husband anything. I didn’t take them because you have to stay aware; you have to feel.
If you mask the feeling, it never goes away. It’s just always there. I did go to a grief counselor and she was wonderful. My husband and I found great help in a grief counselor. She helped us understand a lot of things that we were going through and helped us put it into perspective. You cannot change the grief, but can change the perspective. That was a big help. In that time there is no comfort; people try; they really try to help. I appreciated that, but it is an existential experience. You are in it all alone and that is one of the great dangers, by the way. If you are a married couple, you had better stick together as a couple in your grief. I have seen a lot of families and marriages break up over the loss of a child.
MW: Thank you for sharing those intimate feelings. Is your husband still living and did we get his name?
AB: It is Allen Bradford.
KW: You have a son who teaches here at the University.
AB: Um-hm, Joel.
MW: How many grandchildren do you have?
AB: Twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
MW: Wow, thank you so much for your time today.
KW: Yes, thank you.
AB: You’re welcome.
MW: Thank you for sharing your story with us.
AB: I hope it helps. This is my written copy.
KW: It’s exactly what. I’ve been going through trying to get—
[01:27:11]
End of interviewUtah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 27

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY
Utah Valley University Library
George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections
Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories
Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Anita Bradford
by
Kimberly Williamson
April 4, 2012
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Anita Bradford
Interviewer: Kimberly Williamson
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 4 April 2012
Recordist: Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Kimberly Williamson
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: AB = Anita Bradford (Interviewee)
KW = KimberlyWilliamson (Interviewer)
MW = Michele (Director, Utah Women’s Walk)
Brief Description of Contents:
Anita Bradford talks about growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, California, her experiences as a child dealing with the after math of the Depression, attending East Los Angeles Junior College at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and being sent to Brigham Young University after her freshman year of college. She also discusses her activism surrounding women’s issues, being hired at Utah Valley University to start a new program called “Better Jobs for Women,” and her greatest fight in changing medical procedures during child bearing. She explains various discriminations of women during Second Wave Feminism, her involvement in the ERA, and her bereavement process from the loss of her son. She also describes her battle with a terminal lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and her role as the leader of a state support group which assists people with this disease.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 2
Audio Transcription
[00:26]
Beginning of interview
KW: My name is Kimberly Williamson today is Wednesday April 4, 2012 and I am at the George Sutherland Archives in the Utah Valley University library. Today I am interviewing Anita Bradford to write my senior thesis and as a nominee for the Utah Women’s Walk. Today we are going to talk about her life and the many contributions she has made to Utah Valley University during her years of service.
First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to this interview and coming. I really appreciate it. Let’s start out with you telling me where you were born and your family structure.
AB: Okay, I was born in a town call Bell, California. It’s southeast Los Angeles in a poor working class area that is fairly infamous for a whole lot of reasons. (laughs) It was a great place to grow up as a kid when I was there. We had a lot of freedom. I came from what is known as a traditional family. My dad went to work every day; my mom stayed home. Even though I was born at the height of the Depression, even then married women did not go outside the home to work very much if they had any means of support at all. My dad was a journeyman machinist. Even though they had a terrible time in the Depression, it was before my memories. By the time I was born, my dad was working again, and things were getting better for them. I never felt personally the depths of despair of the Depression, but I was certainly scarred by their experiences. I think that most of us who are in that age group have real issues around security and being secure and those kinds of things. My father was the breadwinner, but I say that my mother was the bread manager. She ran the household. She was the money manager, and she took care of virtually everything else. They were very thrifty, very frugal, and they worked their way into a good solid secure life even though both of them had come from very difficult backgrounds. They were a real team. I learned to be tough and resilient and strong. They just did not allow anything else. (laughs) I think those are the basic core skills that I have.
They both were very much community activists. My father was very much a part of the labor movement. He was always fighting for workers’ rights. My mother was a powerhouse in the PTA. Back in that time in the Depression and World War II and post-World War II, the PTA was probably the most powerful interest group in California. What the PTA wanted, they got. My mother was committed to education for every child regardless of circumstances. She lived with that commitment; it never died for her. That was a crucial thing. She was always very active. In terms of improving educational opportunities. Because of her and the school principal—even though we were in a very poor working class area—we went to a model elementary school. There was not anything better in the United States at the time. It was because of the commitment of that principal, and the commitment of my mother, and the women that were part of that PTA that created that incredible educational environment. I look at kids today and I know that even Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 3
though all of this technology exists, I had the kind of education that very few kids get today. That’s sort of the background.
KW: Okay, let’s go back. When where you born?
AB: I was born in 1933.
KW: The month and day you were born.
AB: Oh, November 1.
KW: Okay, and then siblings.
AB: I have one brother; he was ten years than I. I had a sister, but she died before I was born. But I have to say that she had a tremendous impact on my life because of her loss because of what my mother went through, that affected my life greatly. Even though she wasn’t a real presence, she was very much a presence in my life.
KW: How old was she when she passed?
AB: She was about sixteen months old. Again, it was the depths of the Depression. She got a strep throat, and she became septic very quickly. As hard as they tried, they did not have any penicillin during that time, and they could not save her.
KW: You said that in elementary school, you went to a cutting-edge type school. Do you want to tell us about your junior high and high school experiences?
AB: (laughs) Junior high was a wasteland. I mean it’s just a wasteland for everybody; you just get through it. I don’t have a whole lot of memories of junior high except that it was a drudge. By the time I got to high school—nowadays you have middle schools and junior highs and high schools. We went through the seventh grade until the twelfth grade in the same school. You came in as a little tiny seventh grader, and you were there with seniors and juniors. You just got run over. It was terrifying. (laughs) The junior high [experience] was not the best time [for me]. By the time I got to high school, things were fine. I had a good group of friends. I was active in student government—worked on the school newspaper. I was very active in the Girls Athletic Association. We were the girl athletes of the school such as we were. High school was a much different experience—much better. I was glad to graduate. I was ready to move on. I was a good student. I enjoyed it, and several teachers were influential in my life, but I was ready to go when we graduated.
KW: Were your parents educated then?
AB: Both of my parents graduated from high school, which was, considering where they came from, was very rare. My mother’s high school graduating class only consisted of nine people. They probably represented maybe 10 percent of the population of that age. They Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 4
were in the wild mountains of Arizona in the copper mining area. People just didn’t go onto to school so high school graduation was a very big deal at that time in that place. All the rest of us went on. Their kids and my mother’s siblings’ kids all went on to be college graduates and professionals because education was just pounded into us. (laughs) By—
KW: By your father—
AB: —my grandfather, [he] was really a driving force. He was a Swedish immigrant. He just knew education was the way out of that terrible poverty, so each generation went on to the next level of education.
KW: When you graduated from high school, there was no doubt in your mind that you were going to go—
AB: I was going on to college.
KW: Okay, so where did you go to college?
AB: My first experience in college was East Los Angeles Junior College. It’s now called East Los Angeles Community College, and it’s a four-year school. It was a seminal experience in my life because it brought together everybody from the southeast side of LA. We had the Barrio; we had Watts, which is now known as South Central LA, and Southeast LA. It was a mixture of Latino, White, and Asian. East LA was virtually all Hispanic, and Watts was Blacks. I was a minority in that school. That was my first experience with being a minority in those kinds of settings. It was a great experience, and I loved it. We had good teachers. It was a rattletrap school in that it was made out of old World War II Quonset huts. It was rows and rows of old army barracks and Quonset huts. (laughs) That’s what we went to college in. We had excellent teachers; they were great. That’s when I first got involved in activism.
People do not know it, but the Civil Rights Movement really began in the fifties in those schools. With returning veterans from the Korean War, their previous compatriots out of World War II, they were doing all the groundwork, all the historical research that underwrote the Civil Rights Movement. I knew quite a few of those who went on to make terrific contributions to that. So it was a great experience. My parents wanted me out of there because they saw me becoming too involved, and so even though they were not Mormons, they sent me to BYU [Brigham Young University]—the safest place they could possibly (laughs) could get me.1 Then I went to BYU.
KW: How long did you attend—
AB: I was a freshman there. I did my freshman year there.
1. The Mormon Church is the unofficial, but common name for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and so its members are often called Mormons.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 5
KW: And then you transferred—
AB: Then I came up to BYU.
KW What did you get your degree in?
AB: I got my degree in American history and political science with emphasis on American history and American political theory.
KW: Wow, then did you go on to get—
AB: I was the only female in the history department by the way. I was the only female history student.
KW: Wow, I bet you could tell some stories about that.
AB: Oh, yes. (laughs) Yes indeed, but most of them good, most of them good. [I wasn’t expecting to be the only woman in the department. I became quite shy until I got comfortable with the male students. I was taking a historiography class, and I hadn’t said one word. We took our midterm, which was an essay exam, and the professor, Dr. Richard Paul, wrote on my exam, “Anyone who can write like that can speak. You will not remain silent.” So I began talking in class and I was accepted in study groups. I became good friends with the other students.]2
KW: Then did you go and to get a master’s degree.
AB: I went and did all of my master’s work; I didn’t complete the thesis. By that time I was long married. By the time I went back for my master’s degree, I had a family. That was hard combining graduate work and four kids, home, and whatever. I managed to complete all of the studies, but I got so frustrated trying to write my thesis because what I wanted to do was study the issue of rape in Utah particularly in Utah County because we knew it was a significant problem, but nobody talked about it.
KW: What year was this?
AB: This was back in the early seventies, ’73. When the police chief told me that they didn’t even keep rape statistics—they just saw it as an addendum, an opportunity that men took when they were robbing a house. There were not records; they absolutely had no records. I couldn’t gather any data because it was buried in robbery or in these other kinds of places. They had no data. I just said, “I’ve better things to do with my time.” I left that and I went on to do some graduate studies at the University of Utah and also San Francisco University. I never quite completed the master’s degree.
2. With Anita Bradford’s approval, the portion in brackets was added by Sheree Bench in June 2013.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 6
KW: That is interesting about the rape. You said that you were married. Did you meet your husband in college?
[13:07]
AB: I met him when I was teaching school. I graduated from college and was teaching at Spanish Fork Junior High School. Went right back into the wasteland and met my husband there.
KW: Was he also a teacher?
AB: No, he was just out of the army. It was at the end of the Korean War. He was just back from the army a few months when I met him.
KW: What year were you married?
AB: In 1956.
KW: Then did you start having a family right away?
AB: Yes, well close to right away.
KW: Were you working when you had your family or did you stay at home?
AB: No, it was a time when women were not going into the work place unless they absolutely had too. We suffered along in dire poverty while our kids were little. Then I went back to school in the early seventies and worked on my master’s degree. Then [I] ended up having another baby ten years later. (laughs) My youngest child was ten years old when my youngest child came along, which was another thing that stopped the master’s degree, was that pregnancy. I really needed to get back into the workforce. Our oldest sons were headed to college, missions, and things like that. There just wasn’t enough money to cover all those expanded needs. I needed to get back into the workplace, and started looking for work. That is when this job came available at the college, and then I saw the ad in the paper. I had been out looking for jobs. It was really discouraging because they wanted you to work, but they didn’t want to pay anything. When this job came open, the job description just fit everything I’d been doing.
I had been a political activist always. I had been very active politically. I had been active in helping women. We had a storefront walk-in place where women could come drop in and talk. We had all kinds of things going on. It was at a very small level, but we were dealing with the women’s issues that we could see coming—women who were divorced and did not know where to turn and all kinds of issues—
KW: Now did you do this through an organization or was it something—
AB: It was something we put together; a whole group of us put together—Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 7
KW: Who’s we?
AB: Well, it was a group of friends. If you are talking about a fixed organization, it didn’t have one. It was not funded. People would call us on the phone and ask, Who is funding you? They thought we were part of the communist conspiracy. (laughs) Nobody was funding us; whatever expenses we had, we met. One of the good friends was a nurse and so she along with a doctor opened up a little clinic for women.
KW: Where was this at?
AB: Right downtown Provo, [Utah] right on Center Street.
KW: Okay.
AB: They donated their time to helping women get medical help because they had no access. You have to realize that back in those days women did not have access to contraceptives unless they were married. They did not have access to reproductive health issues. This was a volunteer thing—
KW: This is the kind of women’s issues that you saw in the community, and so you got together with a group of friends—
AB: Yes, we had to do something—just the grass roots something.
KW: Wow, that is—
AB: I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of political experience and a lot of community organization experience when this job came open. It just had my name written on it. Even though there were a number of people who interviewed for it, I just felt that it was going to be—and I pestered them to death. (laughs) I kept calling and saying, “Have you made your decision yet.” It was a very touchy subject. This grant was a very touchy subject, and so the school took their time deciding who they wanted to have here—who they wanted to start the program and how I would fit in. They were careful to begin with and how they wanted it structured was very important. That they had someone who was already a credible member of the community was important. They took great care in establishing it as an integral part of the school.
KW: Did you want to discuss what type of a program? So this was Better Jobs—
AB: We named it Better—it did not have a name. It had a 21,000-dollar price tag. We had 21,000 dollars to work with. That would not cover much at all so I always taught here. Half of my contract came from the teaching; the other half came from the grant. We were trying to conserve as much of the grant for services as possible. From the beginning, I taught half time here [Orem campus] and then the other [time] went into building the program. Some of the best advice I ever got came from a vice-president of administrative Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 8
services named LaVar Rockwood. After I was hired, I went and talked to every single person on that hiring committee about what they had in mind: what they would support and what they wouldn’t support. The best advice he gave me was, “You go to every department in this school and introduce yourself. Do not worry about all of a sudden trying to serve women. First of all get grounded here. Get grounded on this campus; let people know who you are.”
My job—this grant was written to try to get women into nontraditional jobs. We’re not talking about getting them into secretarial. We are talking about getting them out there in automotive, in truck driving, and heavy equipment—things that those men were not used to at all. It was tough. Anyway, I followed his advice, took the first month, and made myself acquainted to every single department in the school especially in the trades, which is where I needed to have some support. They were very skeptical, but not negative. The men in heavy equipment, in fact were very good because they said that women made very good heavy equipment operators. They weren’t negative at all. We got some really good women through that program. Others programs had a tougher time with it. Eventually they saw me not as a threat. They saw the program not as a threat, but as something that they could work with. I got to know people in admissions. I had to know how we got people into school. From the ground up, I had to figure out how the system worked so I could access it.
Then I had to network with all of the outside institutions. The Church was going to be a very important part of this support system; it would continue to be, and still is.3 Welfare—all women had in those days was welfare. That is the only source for support they had. It became very important that we work with welfare and the services that they offered. The grant came from Mountainland Association of Governments, which came down through the federal government. I needed to get to know the people at the Department of Education. There was this whole other outside networking. That had to be done in order to start seeing women being referred into us from these sources, once they had established that we could do what we had set out to do.
And then the other thing was employers; they were just a critical part of this whole thing. They had to be willing to hire these women into these positions. I put together an advisory board made up of several businessmen in the community. All of them were very supportive and we on to be—we couldn’t have survived without them because they ended up making financial contributions; they ended up hiring. They really helped make the program work in the early stages. So give them full credit for having that kind of vision too.
KW: You talk about outreach into the community through agencies. Did you do any other outreach to let women know that this program was available?
AB: Those were their sources of information. You can’t go door to door. (laughs)
3. Anita refers to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 9
KW: Right, right.
AB: Where you made your contact was at the welfare office. We put together flyers and programs. We went out to the schools, and there were a lot of kids there with single parents. We went out to the schools and went to the PTA. We just made contacts wherever we could—any personal relationships within our own networks. And slowly but surely this pattern began to build—women being referred into us. For the first two years, it was fairly slow, but after that, it just took off.
KW: Was this back on the campus when they were in Provo?
AB: We started out on the old campus in Provo. Then they moved us up to this campus. Then they moved us back to the old campus because they had a lot more space down there. We had a really nice suite of offices down there. We had several classes going all the time. By that time, we had expanded the staff. I had an assistant director. We had other women who were either part-time or full-time working on job creation, teaching, training, and those kinds of things. We had a nice layout there. My problem was, I was director over there and teaching on this campus so I was running (laughs) back and forth that was my only problem. I really liked being over there because we had our own classroom space.
KW: What did you teach?
AB: Here?
KW: Uh-huh.
AB: I taught everything in the beginning. I taught English, I taught sociology, I taught—this school was growing by leaps and bounds. (laughs) If you had any kind of background whatever in any subject you were likely to get tossed into that subject. I taught interpersonal communications along with American history—wherever they had a gap to fill. I couldn’t teach math or anything like that, but any of the humanities, I taught at one time or the other.
KW: Let’s go back to the early sixties when Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique came out. Did you read that book or did it have any influence on—
AB: I was a feminist long before Betty Friedan’s book came out. The women’s movement was well underway. It’s like our little storefront project; even though it wasn’t visible and wasn’t seen, the writers were already writing. The history was being done. Betty Friedan’s book—I’m not going to critique the book. It touched a chord that was already there. An idea has to drop on fertile ground; it was just ready to explode anyway. She became a focal point for all those ideas—of all of the pent up anger and all of the frustrations that women had been feeling everywhere. There were other authors that were much greater influences on me—
KW: Do you want to elaborate on those works?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 10
AB: Well, Simone de Beauvoir. There were many feminists in an earlier generation. The whole suffragist movement—the whole turn of the century movement—those women had a tremendous impact on me.
KW: Did you study those women when you were in history?
AB: Uh-huh.
KW: So you were really—
AB: Well on my own; there were no classes that were directed at that at all. There was a whole body of literature by great women—American writers that even though they were novels they still related the realities in women’s lives. I was influenced by all of those [writers]. Betty Friedan struck the spark that began the full origination, the whole sweep of the feminist move. Gloria Steinman was much more direct in [her] involvement, in her writings, and in her speaking than Betty Friedan. It all just came together in the sixties, but we were all there. The army was ready to go. She [Betty Friedan] was not a seminal influence on me specifically.
KW: You mentioned missions.4 I’m assuming that you married somebody who was LDS.
AB: Um-hm, yes.
KW During Second Wave Feminism, did you have young children at home when you came to work here in ‘78?
AB: Oh, yes. When I started to work here, this baby that came along after we thought our family was done, he was two years old when I started to work here. The rest of my children were twelve and into their late teens. They were seniors in high school and juniors in high school.
KW: They refer a lot to second shift of women working and then going home to cooking and cleaning and that.
AB: Uh-huh.
KW: Did you experience that in your relationship?
AB: First of all, my kids were older except for the baby. My kids were very good about coming in after school and picking him up from the babysitter. My husband was very
4. A mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical area to which Latter-day Saint missionaries are assigned. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 11
supportive. One thing I had that a lot of women didn’t have was a husband who really cared about the work that I was doing. He was really proud of the work I was doing. I had a great deal of support from him. The kids were old enough. If they came home and they were hungry, they could fix themselves something. It wasn’t a matter of coming home and having to do [things for them because] they knew how to turn on the washer. They had assignments; they didn’t always keep them. It wasn’t as hard on me in many ways as it was on a lot of the women I worked with who were single parents who had no support system. They didn’t have a supportive husband. They came home and they had to do it all. I had it much better in that way. The second thing was, I was never tied into or worrying about the things that women were judged on. I was never a good housekeeper; I’d rather read a book any day than dust. I let a lot of details go. I concentrated on our family, their well-being, and the big picture. I let the details go.
[31:30]
KW: During that time here in Utah, I know just from doing other interviews that the women would get heat from their neighbors about working outside their home. Did you experience that?
AB: Um, (laughs) a neighbor gentleman who lived next door to us met my husband out at the mailbox one day and said to him, “Mr. Bradford, you are a very patient man.” (laughs) Yeah, they saw me as something—some of them saw me, not all of them. I had a lot of people come to me privately or through the back door to talk or whatever to get advice, but there were those who were very skeptical of me. I had to deal with both those things. One of the questions you ask is and maybe you are coming to that. I have to say: I loved the community that I lived in. These women were remarkable women. The older generation—older than me—they were feminists; they didn’t know it. They were very strong; they were well read. They were dynamic. Somewhere in the fifties that got lost. The post-World War II thing that was, “go home and take care of your families” really came into play. And so those women who had come up in my mother’s generation, they were terrific, and they were very strong mentors for me. I had all kinds of support from those women in my community.
KW: That is good that’s—
AB: When I was fighting to find some kind of contraception just trying to get information—I had five pregnancies in nine years—I was desperate and people did not want to give it to me. Doctors didn’t want to give you that information. I had to really fight. It became a public fight; it was unseemly. I was willing to do anything. Those kinds of things were battlegrounds that most young women today do not even know existed. [They] don’t even know anything about it. They do not know how we delivered children. I put a big long story in here (referring to response to questions sent before interview) this is for you.
KW: Oh.
AB: This is for you. I became the fighting feminist just by the way we had to deliver Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 12
children. Those were stories that are not very well known, and they were not told.
KW: I think that they need to be told because I think women today don’t realize what a fight, and there still needs to be a progressive movement.
AB: We are moving backwards in time. My granddaughters will look at me and say, Why are you talking about contraceptives. I said, “I thought I fought that battle and won it forty years ago. I’m sorry, but you are going to have to fight it all over again.”
KW: Uh-hm.
AB: It is one of those perpetual things. We think we’re safe and we are not.
KW: In one of my classes, we were discussing the election and they said that contraceptives for women and women issues are always the main topic when it is time for an election—
AB: (laughs)
KW: That’s seems to be the fighting battle, which is just alarming to think that.
AB: There is that certain group of people who are just fixed on those ideas. Without access to contraception, all other feminist issues are moot. All the rest just go away. You don’t talk about work for equal pay you if you can’t plan your family.
KW: Right.
AB: That is the fundamental bullwhip of women’s rights. And there are no other rights if that one is taken away. Nothing else is going to take its place. We do fight that battle over and over again from the very conservative element.
KW: Were there women in your life that you admired growing up?
AB: Yes, my mother who was always out there fighting for children. The principal of our school, I adored her.5
KW: [The principal] was a woman?
AB: Yes, she was a woman. She was from Scotland and she had a lovely Scott’s brogue. I still love to hear it because I associate that with love, joy, and all those things that she brought to that school. She was so committed to children and just giving us the best possible education. We had the arts; I mean we had it all. Even during the atomic bomb testing, as children we were taught to get under our desks, she made it exciting. We could hardly wait for the bomb to drop because we were going to stay at school. We had candy and pillows. She was just superb. I had several teachers that were male and female that were
5. Mrs. Ritchie.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 13
important in my life. My older cousins I really admired. Several of the great jazz singers of the time—the jazz singers particularly in their music influenced me. Eartha Kitt and Lena Horne, and Dinah Shore, these are not names that you would have any connection with—
KW: No, I know whom you are talking about. (laughter)
AB: —Billie Holiday. The actresses were not particularly [influential]; I loved movies, but it was the singers that really—
KW: —strong—
AB: — held my attention, I really admired. I loved music and I loved to dance. Those were also very strong women who really had to battle just to survive and many of them didn’t.
KW: Right.
AB: They were great influences on me. Oh, I forgot Eleanor Roosevelt was my heroine. She was the great female political figure that I admired.
KW: During the early seventies, the Equal Rights Amendment was hotly debated across the U.S. And in many states, it passed, but it didn’t in Utah. Did you have any involvement in this process?
AB: (laughs) Up to my eyeballs. Yes, I was very active in the Equal Rights Movement from start to finish. Organizationally, the big culminating experience of that here in Utah was the International Year of the Woman. The Equal Rights Amendment was at its fever pitch. I was on the organization committee for that. I served on the education committee. (laughs) We just got blown out of the water. That was sort of the death knell at that point. From start to finish, I was very much an outspoken.
KW: It made a real division here in Utah.
AB: Yes, it did. It’s still a divide.
KW: Are women as vocal as they were back during the ERA debates?
AB: The Equal Rights Amendment even though it failed, it brought on a whole range of legislation—
KW: Right.
AB: —that eased the burden.
KW: Right. Were you involved with that? Did you work with that group of women that went into the legislation?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 14
AB: Yes.
KW: Oh, okay.
AB: Yes, very much so, especially again on Better Jobs for Women. It all came from legislative funding. We had to be up there every year to fight for the funding with both the federal government and the state government. The money flowed down through the Department of Education and through Mountainland Association of Governments, both of which were what we call soft money. They were federally funded they had to be written by grants every year, and they had to be renewed every year. We were always at risk every year—
KW: Of losing your funding.
AB: Yes, to losing the funding.
KW: When you came in you started saying that the program you started is now called, Turning Point, and it’s the only one in the state that has survived.
AB: It is the only one left in the community in the college system, in the state college system—
KW: Oh, okay.
AB: —to survive. If they have others out there that are outside the college system they may be there, but I’m not aware of any.
KW: Okay, but they are not funded the same way. Do you want to elaborate on why you believe that Turning Point is still at UVU [Utah Valley University]?
AB: Well, I go back to its foundation. It had tremendous support at the highest levels at this school. She wasn’t the academic vice-president then, but Lucille Stoddard was the dean of the School of Business. Carrol Reid was the associate dean of women in student services. We had a strong foundation of people on this campus who were ready to do battle for it and they did. We got into trouble fairly often.
I had good friends in political office who were part of my life. That is part of what I brought into this program with me was a very strong political base. I had outside support, and there were a lot of very strong women. I do not know if these names are familiar to you or not: Algie Ballif, Phyllis Van Wagenen, and this county had some very powerful women who were mentors and supporters. We had a good solid base here of people with significant clout that could keep us going when we ran into problems, and we did. I could call all those chips in when we needed it. I think the reason we have survived is because we started out with such a broad base of support from people that really mattered. The other schools did not; they took the funding because it was there but they really did not Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 15
care. There were good women who ran those programs, but they just didn’t get the support from the wider community and from their own schools that they needed.
Then the second reason why it maintained is you always have to train those who come after you. You have to bring in good people. I had a wonderful woman who was my assistant director who became the director. Her name was Linda Barlow. She married during the time that she was there. She is Linda Johnson now, but she was the assistant director and became the director.
You burn out in these jobs; sorry, but it takes a toll. I was there for ten years; Linda was there for ten years, and followed on by another great woman. Over each decade, the program got bigger and stronger [and] served more people. A daycare program was established. They have a wonderful daycare program over there. They expanded the programs that were offered and the money was available. It just has become an integral of the school.
[45:43]
KW: Now what happened to your storefront, of offering services and that when you came to work here?
AB: It had already disappeared by then. Two of the women that were here left. One took a teaching position up at Westminster. Another woman was the wife of a math professor at BYU, and he took another position. These little grassroots organizations aren’t strong.
KW: Right.
AB: You need a broader institutional base and a more permanent base. That had all ready dissipated, and we had on gone to other—
KW: Was Better Jobs for Women were you able to help women with contraceptives or anything like that.
AB: That was not our field; we referred them on.
KW: Okay, I’m not from here so did they eventually have Planned Parenthood come into—
AB: Planned Parenthood was an important part of our support system. The other part was the women’s shelters for battered women. They got a lot of medical resources through that. The YWCA was a very important part of the shelter system. We had women shelters here that we could get women into very quickly. The shelter would refer them to us for assessment in terms of what they needed for jobs skills. We had a good working relationship there. The women’s shelters were a very important part for medical support as well as safety.
MW: Kimberly, let me interject a question if you don’t mind? Can you give me an exact Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 16
location of where this storefront or pre-Planned Parenthood was?
AB: It was down on Center Street, [Provo] and I am going way back in time. It was down on Center Street right in the middle of the block. And we were upstairs; you had to go up stairs to access it.
MW: Do you know what west or east it was?
AB: It was sort of between University and First. It seems to me that it was right in between University and First West, but it might have been between First and Second.
MW: Okay.
AB: I cannot remember exactly.
MW: How many years did it operate?
AB: Oh, not very long. We weren’t at it very long. There was real suspicion, you know—who are you people? (laughs) The little clinic that we had, created suspicions [even though] the doctor and my friend that was the nurse were just doing basic medical care for women who had no access to medical care anywhere and also contraceptive help and things like. Because we were working outside the norm, it was—
MW: Do you have an approximate date that it would have been? I think this is fascinating that you would do this on your own. Who was the doctor? Do you have the doctor’s name?
AB: I would not give you the name if I remembered. (laughs)
MW: Okay. Because you feel that stigma of—
AB: Yeah—
MW: It was kind of that kind of thing. What years—
AB: He was very young. Um, I am trying to go back to the years; it would have been the late sixties. For me to pinpoint an exact year—I’m not certain but it was at the height of the women’s movement. We had a network from Salt Lake down through here of women who were doing these kinds of things. Trying to get—
MW: Help for—
AB: If you read my story on what it was like to deliver a baby in the 1950s. The one fight we did win was the battle over what happened to us in delivery of children. We were manacled down; our arms were strapped down; our feet were put in stirrups and manacled. We were flat on our backs; we were utterly powerless—just totally powerless. That was my rage and I tell you my story here. [I had a horrendous experience at the birth Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 17
of my daughter in 1966. There were several of us in labor that day. The nurses thought I
would deliver first because I’d already had children. But my labors were usually slow.
The doctor told them, “You could take a trip around the world before Mrs. Bradford
delivers! Call me when she’s ready.” So they let me lay there strapped to the bed. But I
could tell the baby was coming and I told the nurses, but they didn’t pay attention. Finally
a nurse checked me but by then the delivery room was occupied. They didn’t let me
deliver in the bed I was in. The nurse took me to a surgery room and put me on a surgical
table with a straight drop off the end—legs strapped in the air and arms strapped to the
table—and left me there to go find the doctor. Well, I could tell the baby was coming and
I looked up and in the reflection of the equipment I saw the head crowning, and I knew if
that baby was born with no one there, it would fall straight to the floor. So I screamed for
the nurse, and my husband and the nurse crashed through the door at the same time,
followed by the doctor who got there just in time to catch the baby. That was my “aha”
moment!]6
That is what turned me into a street fighting feminist was the humiliation of being told
that I was crazy because I was in labor. When I asked why they were strapping my hands
down they said, “You might hurt yourself.” The first battle that we won, and we really
won it, I think, for good was the battle over how pregnant women were treated. It was
like you didn’t belong to yourself at all; you had no say in what was going to happen to
you and no choices. What happened during this movement—when we did this storefront
thing—what was happening along with that, is a grassroots movement of home births
began. Women decided that they were going to take control of their childbearing
themselves. This whole grassroots movement of lay midwives and home births started. I
was interviewed by the women who wrote Our Bodies, Ourselves.7 The medical system
has always been very quick to respond to the bottom-line. They shifted very quickly into
more humane delivery practices. You began to get birthing rooms, families being able to
be there, and birthing chairs, and more humane practices in delivering babies.
KW: That’s interesting because I would have never thought of that because in First Wave
Feminism those women all had their babies at home.
AB: Exactly.
KW: They had more control.
AB: Sure, my mother-in-law had all her children at home with a midwife.
6. With Anita Bradford’s approval, the portion in brackets was added by Sheree
Bench in June 2013.
7. Our Bodies, Ourselves is a book about women's health and sexuality produced
by the nonprofit organization Our Bodies Ourselves (originally called the Boston
Women's Health Book Collective). The current edition, published in 2011, contains 825
pages.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 18
KW: Then like you said that turn of the centuries and the fifties medical procedures took over—
AB: Became a whole systematic at the convenience of the system and not the woman. That was probably the most successful thing that happened. When my daughter looks back at what I went through—I mean young women cannot believe that happened—that it was possible. I said it was not that long ago (laugh) that was the way you were born.
KW: Didn’t they knock women out?
AB: In earlier days, they did, like my mother.
KW: Right.
AB: She was just out, but that was very damaging to the babies. They quit doing that, but then they still wanted to make it convenient for the doctor. They didn’t trust the mother who was giving birth to take care of her own interests. I don’t know what they thought she was going to do. They just wanted everything to be at their convenience. We just didn’t participate. At that point of time without have the anesthetic to put you out there wasn’t anything in-between. They could give you some pain relief in the early stages, but for me what they could give just stopped my labor entirely. All my babies were full bore natural. Natural birth, which was okay, I still have nightmares about it. (laughs)
KW: Oh.
AB: (laughs) That’s what we did. I mean you knew that it was going to hurt and you just sucked it up. You pushed and you just did it, but it was the treatment that was—
KW: Did you see this discrimination here on campus with women who were pregnant during the years you were here?
AB: Initially women who were teaching here were terrified of revealing if they were pregnant. They would hide it for as long as they could. I probably don’t want to go into those stories because they’re not my stories to tell.
KW: Right.
AB: But, yeah there was that here.
KW: Did you feel discriminations being a woman as far as wage and that type of thing when you were here?
AB: No, the school had you come in and here is the wage scale. This is where you fit into the wage scale. You did not feel discrimination because it was a very public—you went up this column and then you shifted to that column depending on your education and your years of experience. I am sure there was some there; I don’t doubt at all. I’m sure they Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 19
could find a man with more experience than a women coming in with the same. That was not my focus. We did run into other kinds of discrimination, promotional discrimination and those kinds of things. The first big EEOC battle that was waged in the state was on this campus and won, but it took three years.
[56:22]
KW: Is that when they had to go to the appellate court to finally get a decision.
AB: Well, it didn’t go to court because it went through the Equal Opportunity Commission. It went through that route. It had to go all the way to the top of that route to get it settled. It took three years for that to happen.
KW: After you left the program, did you leave UVU?
AB: No, I transferred in and became full-time faculty.
KW: In what department?
AB: In the history political science department. I taught history, and the first classes that were created here. I created anthropology and archeology. I taught philosophy and American history.
KW: How long did you stay here at UVU?
AB: I was here until—(laughs) I’ve been in and out so it is hard to say when did you end.
KW: Uh-huh.
AB: My official retirement I think came in ’99, but the school was growing by leaps and bounds, and they just had need of additional faculty. You have interviewed Elaine Englehardt, and she brought the Ethics and Values, and they needed teachers for that so they asked me to come back and teach in Ethics and Values, that philosophy class. I did that for two or three years. Finally, around 2003, 2004, I was finally just gone. (laughs)
KW: You said, “Forget it no more—
AB: Well, you know part of the problem was having enough faculty. As they moving towards university status they really had to make sure that everybody had those degrees and they were in place. I was ready to be done anyway; that was okay with me. They had to really get their ducks in a row to get accredited for the advanced degrees. I didn’t have those things. There was a real march towards [becoming a university] and they brought in a wonderful faculty. There was terrific faculty during that time.
KW: What would you say was your most difficult trial you faced?Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 20
AB: I wasn’t clear on what you wanted in that question or if you meant—
KW: Throughout your life.
AB: Public difficulty, private difficulty, I wasn’t sure where you were going—
KW: Whatever you feel comfortable in. I would say private but if it—
AB: Okay—
KW: —is too private of course, we do not—
AB: I divided it in two because public and private lives are very different. The public loss was the loss of the ERA. I put my whole heart and soul in that. The private one was the death of my son.
KW: Oh, my how old was he?
AB: Sixteen.
KW: Where did he fit into the family?
AB: He was the baby.
KW: Oh, the one—
AB: Uh-hm.
KW: That’s a tough situation. Have you lived your life by any mottos or maxims?
AB: One is just keep moving; it is hard to hit a moving target. (laughs) You just keep moving forward, and you never give up. I think what my parents taught us about being resilient and tough have translated it into those kinds of things. Life is tough, and I come out of that period of time when people really had to scrabble just to survive. You never ask the question why me. If it happened to you, you just sucked it up. You put it in place and you fought your way through it. I don’t have a motto in terms of—
KW: Right.
AB: I don’t have a bumper sticker. (laughs) Those are sort of the core values. Is that you live life as it comes, and there is great joy and there is great sorrow. And you don’t get through this life—hopefully, you will get both. It would be nice, but I don’t know. Sorrow just goes with living. You get both; you get the high spots and you get the low spots. My mother died at ninety. She had a very hard life, but at the end, she was contented. She remembered all the good things, and she let go of a lot of the difficulties. I think we do this hopefully if we age well, we sort of put everything in perspective. Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 21
KW: What advice would you give to women in Utah today?
AB: You are going to fight these fights all over again. We thought we had them won and they are not. I just come back to that core issue for women. If they do not have control of their own bodies, if they can’t do their family planning, all the other issue are removed. You just do not have any other options; you have to be able to plan your families. You have to be able to do what’s best for you and your family. I cannot tell you how many women came through our program with seven, eight, and nine children. The fathers just got fed up; they participated in it, but they just walked away from it. That was one of the issues; those women had [was] big families and that’s devastating. You ask a question down here that I thought was really important. (looking through notes) You ask about the issues of wage discrimination and those kinds of things, and one of the things that you didn’t put there and it is very important. Arguably, the single biggest issue for women in the work place was sexual harassment.
KW: Um.
AB: We don’t often know and women who have not been in the workplace do not know how pervasive or how insidious it is and was. Virtually every single woman I dealt with. I dealt with it in my own life. I dealt with it with every single woman who came through [the program]. Every single woman who is a friend and we’ve talked. Have all faced it. Along with wage discrimination was the objectification of women. Particularly if they were single, they were extremely vulnerable to harassment. It was just as pervasive here as it was any place else. We finally have laws on the books that protect women, but it doesn’t protect them all the way.
KW: Right.
AB: Women are in that one pretty much alone. They have to be trained and taught. One of the things we did in Better Jobs for Women was we trained them how to cope with sexual harassment because we knew they were going to face it.
MW: Wow, how did you train them? What could they do in those days without the laws? What would you recommend that they do? How bad was the sexual harassment?
AB: Oh, it was pervasive; it was everywhere. It was pretty much taken for granted. The men didn’t see it at all; they didn’t recognize it for what it was. They protected one another in that whole thing. First of all, we taught them that when they recognized that somebody has their eye on them and was putting them in these situations, we taught them not to be alone. They did not go into this man’s office or they did not go into this particular space alone. They kept something between them and the other person. Secondly, they found mentors within the system who would protect them. And very often, that was another man who would do that, at some risk. At some risk, they would do that. We taught them how to recognize the signals. We also taught them how to recognize their own vulnerabilities because very often these women were single and lonely, and they were Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 22
vulnerable. We taught them that in a case in a workplace, it is going to be the woman who goes and not the man. If you are involved with a man at your workplace, you are going to be gone not him. If you need that job, you have to figure out how to avoid it. We did lots of funny things too. (laughs) What they would face often if they rejected the male outright then he would spread the rumor that they were a lesbian. I mean (laughs) that was just common ground. I had to deal with that with one of the young women that worked here.
KW: (laughs) Oh, gosh.
AB: Women are much better at coping with that now. They have a lot more options now in coping with it. Today women are in a lot more powerful position because of the laws. They can look at them and just say no. Back then, that wasn’t the case especially when they desperately needed the jobs. Everything depended on the attitude of the person who was at the top. If the person at the top was lenient towards sexual harassment, was lenient towards exploiting those women, then it went all the way down the line. If the person at the top kept it in check and didn’t tolerate it, then women were in a safe place.
KW: That is very, very true—
MW: Generally speaking, was UVU a safe atmosphere for women?
AB: Generally yes. There were a few exceptions but generally yes.
KW: What would you like to be remembered for?
AB: That you never give up. That you know that the battles you think you are won are not.
This has been going on since the beginning of time. I don’t care what issue it is; issues of freedom are never settled. You just have to keep trying, you have to keep working at it, and that’s at the personal level as well as at the political and social level. It’s across the board, and people get tired; you get worn out. There has to be the next generation that comes along who is (laughs) willing to take it up. I thought we had laid some things to rest, but they’re definitely not.
KW: Did you teach your children to be active in political rights?
AB: Right, two of my sons have run for public office—very politically active. I’ve got the whole spectrum. I have kids who really have come into the political arena and been community activists. I’ve got one who just did not. You talk about nightmares; he still has nightmares about being out in the street with me, when he (laughs) was six years old marching down the street handing out pamphlets. He does not want anything to do with it. My daughter who is very much a feminist, but she is not politically active. She does other things that express that. She’s a yoga instructor. She’s into the alternative kinds of things and so she’s taken it in a different direction. That is fine; that is good with me. They’re sort of all over the map, but all believers in human rights.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 23
KW: What about your grandchildren? Have you tried to educate them?
AB: Oh, yeah, we’re all politically orientated. The grandkids in many ways are more so than their own parents. Again they sometimes take it in different directions, but they’re all very active, very aware, and into their own particular phases of political activism.
KW: Are you still really politically active?
AB: Well, being a Democrat—(laughs)
KW: I was going to say, do you go to the caucuses. (laughs)
AB: No, I’m not; I have to be honest with you. Again, that is a battle that has to be taken up by this generation. I donate and I support and I write and I do all those things, but the physical aspect of being out there, I don’t do that anymore. The political climate is so different than it was then. It makes it harder for me.
KW: What kinds of things do you write? So you said that you still write?
AB: Oh, yeah, essays.
KW: Do you submit them to journals?
AB: Well, not journals, but letters to the editor—
KW: Okay.
AB: —those kind of things. I wrote for my sons when they were running for office. Lucille and I keep threatening to write a book, but (laughs) we will see if that ever happens.
KW: I think you should.
AB: Do you have any more questions for me?
KW: (turning to Michele Welch) Do you have any other questions, Michele?
[01:14:15]
MW: I’m interested in knowing what you would like to accomplish before the end of your life. Is there anything that you would like to have happen that you haven’t accomplished yet?
AB: I still have some traveling to do. I don’t know whether if I will be able to do it or not, but I still have the hopes that I can accomplish that. I am very, very interested in our medical system—what it can and cannot do. The interest groups that control access to even research, those are things that I am working on now. I have hobbies; I keep bees and I’m a beekeeper. There are things that provide escape and wonder and joy for me. I think that Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 24
you have to be involved in that way too. I think you cannot just be angry all the time. (laughs)
MW: How many hives do you have?
AB: We had five; we lost some this winter, so we’re rebuilding our hives. We have two that are still healthy. My son and I, between us, we have seven hives. We provide wonderful honey for the family; [they are] just fascinating creatures to watch.
MW: What other hobbies do you enjoy doing?
AB: I read incessantly. Again traveling when I can is important to me. Gardening is important. I’ve always been a swimmer, but my health situation right now sort of limits that. I’m going to work with the doctor to help get me back into the pool, but swimming with an oxygen tank becomes problematic. I didn’t realize that it was going to be because there’s all kinds of scuba diving equipment. I have always been a snorkeler so I thought there is no problem they will have oxygen tanks that they’ll have. They have nothing for people who have lung problems to get into the pool and swim, which seems ridiculous to me. There would be a lot of money in it for someone who came up with an inventive way. I’ve jerry-rigged a system and everyone that does swim who has a lung disease has jerry-rigged some kind of silly system that doesn’t work very well, but it does get you in the pool. I need to be more dedicated to that.
MW: Do you mind telling us about your physical condition? When that started or when that happened?
AB: I have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It’s a terminal disease; there is no cure. There is no known treatment, but I’m an activist. I went looking for what people know. I discovered up at the University of Utah drug trial programs going on. I got into a drug trial program. When you have nothing to lose, you might as well get involved. In that process, they asked me to be the leader of the support group for people with this disease in this state. I am the informal leader of the IPF support group. We meet every other month and have experts come in and talk to us about how we can manage our health and what we can do. I have been in this drug trial program now for four years, which is much longer than most drug trials programs go on. In the first phase, you have a double blind study in which part of the group gets a placebo and part gets the medication. Nobody knows, not even the doctors who are monitoring know what you got. Then they test you constantly for how well you are doing. When they got through the first phase then they put us all on the drug. We went into the second phase where they put everyone on the drug. Then they went to the FDA for approval. This particular drug has been approved in Europe; it’s been approved in Japan. The initial group between the placebo and the drug, there was not enough differentiation between how well they did. The placebo group did pretty much as well as the drug group. The FDA wanted evidence of greater separation so they continued—they keep on continuing the trial until they satisfy the FDA that there is some value in the drug.Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 25
MW: When were you diagnosed with this disease?
AB: Five years ago.
MW: Has it changed your life significantly?
AB: Oh, yes, it does change your life significantly. Yeah, I can’t do the things that I used to do. Fortunately, I was very healthy except for being told you have a terminal lung disease. (laughs) The rest of me was in good shape. I have held up far longer than the average prognosis. But I’m beginning to see over those four years there has been a drop in lung capacity. I think the drug has helped because I think it has slowed down the progress of the disease. It’s not going to cure it, but it has slowed it down significantly.
MW: Did you have any other health problems throughout your life or were you always healthy?
AB: I was pretty much healthy, and there’s no history of it in my family at all. Probably an environmental genetic collision that [caused it], I think the environment is creating incredible range of diseases that we have not had to face before.
MW: Yes.
KW: We see that here in Utah, and it’s really scary.
MW: Do you mind if I ask you and you say you do not want to go there—because you mentioned Eleanor Roosevelt, and I am a lover of Eleanor myself. She said, “There is nothing particularly interesting about another person’s life’s story unless as we read it, we can say why that is how they worked it out perhaps there is a way that I can do it too.” If you don’t mind going back and telling us about your son’s passing away. Is that too difficult to talk about or is it something you can teach other women about what you’ve learned through that loss or any of the circumstances?
AB: Yeah, it is such a devastating thing. As you go down into such depths, it is so difficult. I find it very difficult when someone has gone through this to go and comfort them because I know there isn’t any. What I do is go and say, “I’m here and I understand.” For everybody it is different; everybody brings a different set of coping skills or survival skills. I don’t know what you call them, but everybody brings something different.
KW: Was your mother still alive when your son passed?
AB: No, as a matter of fact she died three years before he did. One of the things that I knew from her that affected my life is she was never able to resolve her grief [of my sister’s passing]. So she could never give to me what she could have because she was afraid of that hurt again. One of the things I knew is that I couldn’t back away from my own children. I couldn’t be afraid and had to get past the worst of that for them. The other thing, I think you have to let yourself go into the grief. Just go into it. Experience it all Utah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 26
and I don’t think you ever get it resolved. I don’t think you ever get over it if you don’t. One of the interesting gender things is the doctor handed me the candy store in terms of pills to ease my grief. They never offered my husband anything. I didn’t take them because you have to stay aware; you have to feel.
If you mask the feeling, it never goes away. It’s just always there. I did go to a grief counselor and she was wonderful. My husband and I found great help in a grief counselor. She helped us understand a lot of things that we were going through and helped us put it into perspective. You cannot change the grief, but can change the perspective. That was a big help. In that time there is no comfort; people try; they really try to help. I appreciated that, but it is an existential experience. You are in it all alone and that is one of the great dangers, by the way. If you are a married couple, you had better stick together as a couple in your grief. I have seen a lot of families and marriages break up over the loss of a child.
MW: Thank you for sharing those intimate feelings. Is your husband still living and did we get his name?
AB: It is Allen Bradford.
KW: You have a son who teaches here at the University.
AB: Um-hm, Joel.
MW: How many grandchildren do you have?
AB: Twelve grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
MW: Wow, thank you so much for your time today.
KW: Yes, thank you.
AB: You’re welcome.
MW: Thank you for sharing your story with us.
AB: I hope it helps. This is my written copy.
KW: It’s exactly what. I’ve been going through trying to get—
[01:27:11]
End of interviewUtah Women’s Walk: Anita Bradford 27